Panorama of the Thames Project

Friday, 16 August 2013

In 1829 the London publisher Samuel Leigh produced a panorama which depicted both banks of river Thames between Richmond and Westminster in one continuous painting. The work covers about 15 miles of the Thames and is about 60ft in length. It was very popular in its day and since its publication this panorama has become a valuable record of the late Georgian riverside. The Panorama of the Thames project will bring Leigh's panorama into the 21st century.

Using a unique photographic process, this project will create a contemporary version of the Leigh panorama, showing the Thames riverside as the great river follows its course through Greater London from Hampton to Tower Bridge. These modern, high resolution panoramas follow the meanders along 26 miles of river – 52 miles of riverside – and will provide an archive of today's river landscape much as you'd see walking the towpath or from a boat. Details of the main features along the river, and their heritage, will be provided by local groups in each of the riverside communities.

The project will create a website to display the panoramas, showing the major settlements and landmarks along the riverside, including all 33 Thames bridges in London and the inhabited islands.

As a tribute to the 1829 Samuel Leigh publication the project will also include a new digital restoration of the Leigh Panorama, which is underway at the moment with independent funding.

The project team has been working very hard in the past months and the digital restoration of the Leigh panorama is now completed. The descriptions of the riverside buildings are being written at the moment by a team of historians and should ready by 27th September for adding to the database. The software development has been scoped and is now commissioned and underway. It requires very special, innovative software as the panorama is extraordinarily wide and we need it to work on small screens such as mobile tablets and phones in addition to conventional computers; this has introduced some new technical challenges for the software team. After completion of the software the website development is scheduled to commence in October. If there are no unexpected major delays the team anticipates the Leigh (1829) part of the project will be completed around the end of this year and will be launched shortly afterwards. http://www.panoramaofthethames.com